So focusing on just those 11 episodes, the order of character significance seems to be: Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Rand, Sulu, Scott, Uhura -- although Scott and Uhura could be flipped if you go by number of appearances rather than story prominence.

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Interestingly enough, the regulars during the first half of season one, were (from greatest pay to least) Shatner, Nimoy, Kelley, Whitney, and Takei. Doohan was contracted as a recurring player and Nichols was a simple day player.

In other words, character significance seems to line up fairly close to contractual significance.

Carry on...

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Wasn't Doohan actually dismissed from the series early on only to be brought back?

I missed Rand. I wish she'd gotten a few more substantial appearances. I really liked her performances, especially in Miri (which is an episode that I'm not that crazy about and that I would rewatch strictly for Rand).

According to Memory Alpha, Rand was in the original "Galileo Seven" script. She was also going to be in "Dagger of the Mind," and the Helen Noel character was created to replace her there (interesting, considering that it was produced just before "Miri," one of her biggest episodes). She was going to be in "Shore Leave," and her scenes with Kirk were rewritten for McCoy when Barrows was put in her place. And we know that she was in Ellison's first draft of "City on the Edge of Forever."

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While I absolutely love Helen Noel, I think that replacing Rand because the script required her relationship with Kirk to be too up front was a fairly feeble excuse. Rand lost out on her biggest and best role, probably the only one where she isn't merely decorative or playing the victim. It would have broadened her scope tremendously. Her relationship with Kirk was pumped too much in too many of those early episodes, especially looking at her legs in Miri, but at least in this episode it could have been more playful.

In fact, the Enemy Within would have provided a very good opportunity to draw a line under their relationship - or at least put the genie back in the bottle for a while if the show had had more of an arc.

Her role in the City on the Edge of Forever comic shows how easy it would have been to fill Noel's boots had they made that decision and to take a more forthright role if they had been willing to give her a bigger chunk of the action as the female lead. It's a shame that none of the nuTrek writers went back to reconsider her character concept.

Harvey recently shared with me some notes and memos concerning "The Conscience of the King", which was, of course, the last episode filmed to feature Rand, and Sir Rhosis shared the Sept 8, 1966 revised final draft.

What's interesting about these docs is to see the fingerprints of Janice's removal from the show.

In the final episode all you see of her is her walk-on onto the bridge where she eyes the exiting Lenore.

In the script you can see she had an appearance and a line in the observation deck scene as well.

And if you look at the shooting schedule you can see she was supposed to appear at the tag and comment on Lenore.

Justman's notes have Janice's name circled with a ? pointing to it, as if wondering if she was going to be in it or not.

Yeah it was strange. I could not see the point of having her in an episode (beyond the early establishing ones) if she wasn't going to add anything of her personality to the plot. It wasn't just Rand though. a lot of women had largely decorative roles in the seventies and eighties often with a scene at the beginning and the end of the show and not much contribution in between.

It's interesting that Sally Knyvette who played Jenna Stannis has said in the past that one of the reasons she left Blakes 7 was because she felt that the women didn't get a fair crack in the later episodes of the show, which is not how I remember Jenna at all. Even Marina Sirtis was frustrating that Troi was never allowed to get stuck in more often. It must have been seriously frustrating for actresses in the sixties and seventies with the crap they had to work with.

Not to get too deep or anything, but this discussion makes me again wonder just how all the history we've learned since childhood can possibly be considered accurate, when something like the story of Janice Rand cannot be determined with absolute certainty, and that was only a half-century ago, and many people involved survive to this day.